Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday May 21, 2013 @10:05PM
from the still-winning-the-version-race-against-firefox dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Google on Tuesday released Chrome version 27 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The new version features a big boost to page loads (now 5 percent faster on average) as well as significant updates for developers. The speed improvement is thanks to the introduction of 'smarter behind-the-scenes resource scheduling,' according to Google. Starting with this release, the scheduler more aggressively uses an idle connection and demotes the priority of preloaded resources so that they don’t interfere with critical assets."

Same reason applications that used to fit on a floppy and launched in 5 seconds on a 33 mhz computer now require multiple DVDs and still take 5 seconds to launch: more features (whether necessary or not) and better graphics and other resources. Pages in 2003 probably used more highly-compressed graphics and didn't rely half as much on externally-loaded fonts and all sorts of Javascript garbage (including 3rd-party-loaded material such as Facebook "Like" buttons that allow Facebook to track your every move around the web).

Extension? Chrome and Firefox both have that capability native these days.

Firefox: Go to about:config and search for click_to. Turn it to true. (It's really neat and even tells you what type of content you'll load before you click.)Chrome: Go to chrome://settings/content and select Click to play for plugins.

If you want a Google Chrome like browser I would recommend Chromium, which unlike Google Chrome is open source and doesn't track you as much as their proprietary product. You will miss out on some of the extra features available only in Google Chrome, but most of it should be the same.